A trailing spouse
by David Benjamin
“He
LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey — McCabe is
Comey!! No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”
— Donald Trump, 13 Apr.
TAIPEI — Too often, we tend to measure our lives by our irritations.
We
have, for instance, a White House occupant who is — if we can believe
his boasts — worth billions. He owns towers. He holds the most powerful
office in the world. His First Lady is an exotic supermodel who lets him
romance Playmates and porn stars, and he never — ever! — loses at golf.
And yet, his Twitter feed is a shrill fugue of grievances. One of the
most privileged silver spoons in the history of Fifth Avenue, he
nonetheless styles himself as Job, the quintessential whipping-boy of an
unfair God.
Incongruously, I feel Donald Trump’s pain. I, too,
have ample reason to bellyache about my unappreciatedness. But when I
look a little more closely, it occurs to me that any of my troubles
short of death tend to come off as presidentially self-indulgent.
I
entertained this philosophical perspective while having coffee at a
food court in the Yuanshan district of this city, where a little girl in
a pink dress was dancing for me. I’d come to Taipei because Hotlips, my
wife, was a guest moderator at a conference on automotive technology.
I’m what is called a “trailing spouse,” a somewhat demeaning designation
with which I’ve reconciled because of the perks it bestows.
Not
only do I get to travel in Hotlips’ wake, I’ve become haltingly
conversant on the functions of AI, radar and lidar in the dubious new
wave of algorithmic, deep-learning, self-motivating Hal 9000 robocars.
My only role on this trip was to copy-edit Hotlips’ news dispatches.
This left me pretty free to explore Taipei. By now, venturing into the
strange (to me) precincts of a Chinese-speaking city of seven million
souls holds few terrors. This wasn’t always so.
My first big city
was Milwaukee. I was eleven, and on the very first day of my month with
Aunt Barbara and Uncle Merv, I took a walk, made a wrong turn and got
lost. I immediately assumed I would die. Only a frantic bout of
scurrying and whimpering got me back — entirely by happenstance — to
Barbara’s doorstep. After that, I never set foot beyond the stoop, and
Milwaukee remained for me a sinister black box.
Now, in Lisbon
or Kowloon, if I happen to blunder into an uncharted neighborhood, I say
to myself, “Well, this is interesting.” I explore, stick my head into a
church or two, take snapshots voluminously, stop for coffee, catch up
on my travel diary and figure out where the closest subway station is.
Urban Rule #1: There’s always a subway station.
After
all these wander years, I dread no longer the storied hazards of
Metropolis. But I grew up in a small town and I know how fearfully a lot
of folks regard the nearest big city. They see a moonscape of horrors
where voracious criminals of degenerate ethnicity lurk in black
doorways, waiting to pounce on the gormless hayseeds from Gooberville,
to strip them naked, rape and rob and leave them bleeding, broken in the
verminous gutters of the meanest streets in a godforsaken dystopia.
Having
lived in — and survived — my share of godforsaken dystopias, I tend to
just cross over to the mean street’s sunny side, where I find myself
smiling, nodding, peeking into picturesque alleys and petting the
occasional feral dog. Here in Taipei, suddenly, I was accosted by a
genial native pushing a wheelchair, testing his broken English and
offering directions. I say, “No, I’m fine. Thanks very much.” (I knew
exactly where the subway was.) By and by, I collected the little
dancing girl, a lady in the park doing tai chi, two other ladies
practicing kendo, and a cameraful of photos of trees, flowers and birds I
would never see in Wisconsin, or even Minnesota.
My stroll
continued toward a pair of temples that promised dragons and dioramas.
Then, there was Dihua Street. The top half is a half-deserted ghetto of
decrepit doorways and old men on park benches, the lower half a
street-clogging marketplace selling shiitake by the bushelful, a hundred
varieties of dried fruit and spices, most of which I didn’t recognize,
cookware and housewares, shirts, pants, shoes, ceramics, giant
woodcarved gods and monsters, heaps of veggies, piles of greens, walls
of flowers, a ramen joint, the odd Buddhist shrine, a coffee and tea
shop on every corner and in the midst of all this, a Starbucks and a
Seven-Eleven.
All the way down Dihua, I found nary a mugger, nor
ninja, nor even an enterprising pickpocket. I interacted with a lady who
sold me chopsticks and two lovely little hand-carved wooden frogs (for
my grandsons). She cut the price, “Just for you,” she said but this I
doubt. I could’ve probably haggled her down a little more but come on,
man. This shit is cheap.
I think I enjoy this circus all the more
because I’m no longer young. The recent deaths of my sister and brother
— and too many friends — are intimations of mortality that lend urgency
to my curiosity and render rather insignificant my fear of the stranger
in the black doorway.
When I come home from these travels, I
tend not to talk too much about where we’ve been, what I’ve seen, what
we ate and where I got lost. And most people don’t ask — but not, I
think, because they’re envious. It’s more a matter of indifference or,
more accurately, realism. They know how hard it is to convey the
experience — the sights, sensations, smells and surprises — with an
immediacy that brings them back to life. A memory begins to perish as
soon as it’s born. The tale pales in the telling because the moment was
unique to the witness. The little girl in the pink dress was dancing,
after all, just for me.
About that, I cannot complain.
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
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